Starship is not yet reusable but they have the MVP and a fantastic position to iterate forward.
-- they have an orbital launcher with the largest diameter cargo bay
-- larger sats have bigger antennas and bigger PV area and more bus power. this scales as diam^2
-- 26 x Starlink v3 ~40-65 tons to LEO
-- every launch generates revenue, locks out the orbit for competitors.
-- they can launch more volume, more mass and cheaper than anyone else by a large margin
-- the design is validated - things will work
-- there is technical debt, issues but the rocket did the job
Caveats
-- timelines for full reusability are optimistic etc
-- there will be other issues in scaling to launching gigawats into orbit
-- cooling will have to be
-- Musk might go Full Villan mode before the thing works
[meta] I really didn't like that other negative comment getting voted to the top.
Looks like it's made by someone who never worked in a bigco.
For every bigco I worked, at any time there were hundreds if not thousands of open issues.
You could list them and try arguing the company is about to fail and you'd scare people who don't know better.
It's the judgement of the severity of the issue that matters not #no_of_issues.
And if there were 0 issues would our job exist?
[edit] getting the formatting right is very hard, maybe we could get a preview / TinyMCE ?
The live channel has some video of recovery of the last starship which is pretty cool - it remained floating so they crawled up and removed some of the tiles to see how they performed, and actually reinstalled a few of them for the upcoming flight. So this mission will actually see some of the tiles flying for a second time.
> During operational flights, SpaceX plans to bring both Super Heavy and Ship back to the launch pad, where they'll be caught by the tower's "chopstick" arms. The company has already done this three times with Super Heavy but has not yet attempted it with Ship.
Zero. Starlink v3 is too big for the F9 payload fairing. It's not just a matter of mass, the diameter and overall volume is important as well. In terms of performance, last I read they're supposed to add 1 Tbps of capacity each, so assuming they all work the first time all 26 would be around 10x the network addition of a full F9 v2 Mini launch. But the larger antennas would have other advantages beyond sheer bandwidth, and they'll be able to start getting more serious about direct to cell.
I’m a bit saddened this thread has so little activity, 55 comments as of posting, here even though there are half a million people watching the spacex stream. Just watching the launch, the amount of technology and people involved is incredible.
Hard to get sincerely engaged when the genuine achievement is surrounded by insanity like mars colonization or gigawatt datacenters in orbit, both in a decade.
This is ballistics weapons technology, being progressed by a country that can't stop missile striking people, who has recently declared its intent to heavily weaponize space, whose leader has recently "claimed the moon", who is actively declaring its desire to annex its own allies, done by a corporation whose profits will be almost exclusively concentrated in a very small group of the already-wealthy in a country with horrific wealth disparity.
The V-2 was also a technological achievement. Doesn't mean the UK was cheering it on.
It's like a thousand different technologies, some ancient some relatively new. I don't precisely delight in my new space overlords, but I can still wonder at the enormous object being launched into space!
Calm down. V-2 was a missile whose very design intent was to kill people.
If Starship ever kills people, it will be a disaster, but not intent.
This will help grow Starlink. Plenty of people are already enjoying their Starlink connection in places where the previous provider had either absurdly low quality for high price, or where connectivity was not a thing at all.
I for one am happy that kids living in remote villages can now access online schools and sick people can consult their problems at least with some online doctor. Sailors are pretty happy too.
All rocket development is weapons development, which is why ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations) classifies rocket and space tech as sensitive national security items and is why foreign nationals can't even work on Starship. The entire US space program was funded for military development in the first place.
The difference between Starship and a missile designed to kill people is a simple swapping of the payload. More realistically given vehicle costs, its an ideal heavy lift platform for cheaply placing other weapon vehicles into orbit - a stated goal of the current administration.
> This will help grow Starlink. Plenty of people are already enjoying their Starlink connection in places where the previous provider had either absurdly low quality for high price, or where connectivity was not a thing at all.
Plenty of people are also using Starlink to wage war, and its already become political as access is provided and removed at whim.
I love space. I love space technology. I work on a game set in space. I am not enthusiastic about notorious individuals having the will and capability to mass-weaponize space.
Almost every technology can be used to wage war. But not all war activities are evil. I am happy that the Ukrainians can use Starlink to defend themselves against a brutal aggressor and preserve sovereignty of their country.
"The difference between Starship and a missile designed to kill people is a simple swapping of the payload."
If you insist on this worldview, you will always be miserable around every technological development out there. Just imagine what can be done with mRNA or maybe 3D printing.
"I am not enthusiastic about notorious individuals having the will and capability to mass-weaponize space."
I am pretty sure that militarization of space will be a decision of governments, not Musk himself. He is not rich enough to be able to build an actual orbital army and not get arrested.
Unless by a "notorious individual" you mean Trump or Xi... in which case, there isn't much new under the sun, because governments have weaponized space since the very beginning.
What I feel is positive is the civilian use of the technology. The military use will always be there, but the civilian use needs better and cheaper tech, which is what Starship is. Some medications could be produced in the orbit for example, and with enough launch capacity, they could be produced for the entire planet at once.
That doesn't make much sense, a previously private corporation (which just recently went public) is achieving economical launch to orbit and has made continual progress on that front over decades while politics has both worked for and against them. To me, that is a refutation of "launching things into orbit is politics" especially when you compare the very politically entangled incumbents' launch cadence and capacity.
Orbit is a global public commons, how is it not a political issue? It can be a political issue AND an engineering marvel, regardless of what other organizations are doing
For all very real SpaceX achievements there's certain Musk fatigue if you haven't noticed. He's done enormous job to sour people on the idea of becoming multiplanetary species.
Speaking as a crab in a bucket, for all the very real WorldX achievements there's a certain Muskcrab fatigue if you haven't noticed. He's done enormous job to sour fellow crabs on the idea of leaving this bucket.
The biggest issue is the whole idea of colonizing Mars or anywhere else as a backup runs into a couple major issues. 1) These backups are going to be extremely dependent on Earth for supplies because the alternative is replicating a tiny version of the whole planet's industrial base which will only make economic sense if transporting goods between these locations is extremely expensive, which is something that makes setting them up in the first place also prohibitively expensive. 2) Any technology that makes Mars/Space/etc survivable also makes it possible for an Earth based civilization able to survive basically any calamity up to the death of the Sun.
To your first point: yes, that's the whole idea and it's been the same playbook for any colony from the Americas to Australia. Mars is a much bigger challenge but our technology has advanced enough to make this possible. Let those who would dare risk their lives to achieve something great do so. If you don't want to participate then you don't have to, this isn't a national or international project so you can safely sit it out.
To your second: there are calamities for which a second self-sufficient planet would be necessary. A large asteroid impact would utterly wreck the global industrial base which is highly dependent on international trade and specialization of resource extraction and manufacturing in different regions of the world, having an independent backup on a different planet is one of the few ways to hedge against this. You could argue that every country on earth be fully self-sufficient and then maybe they could survive but that seems like a much bigger task since you'd be building multiple completely independent civilizations instead of just one. Guarding against another global pandemic is another and being out of range of nuclear weapons and their fallout is a third.
The point on the first is the offworld colony is not a backup if it cannot be self sufficient and requires critical materials from Earth. Colonies like Australia also weren't meant or built to be self sufficient, they were extractive, extending the military reach of the British Empire and bringing in resources to make it rich. If the goal is a "backup" civilization it needs to be self sufficient for a long period to allow it to "restore" to Earth...
> A large asteroid impact would utterly wreck the global industrial base which is highly dependent on international trade and specialization of resource extraction and manufacturing in different regions of the world
That's economic collapse not extinction level collapse, space based mining might help with that but it's not the kind of event that actually makes a self sufficient
> Guarding against another global pandemic is another
This kind of presumes a very low level of travel and trade between Earth and Elsewhere which is extremely unlikely per problem 1 and the fact they'll need some economic reason to exist, at the very least they'll have to make money to buy the necessary items from Earth they cannot produce locally.
> being out of range of nuclear weapons and their fallout is a third.
This goes back to the actual thing I was talking about even a heavily bombed out Earth is hundreds of times easier to survive on than Mars or any given asteroid. Hence any tech that makes those places survivable make even the most damaged Earth also survivable.
I bet an underlying thought is that we crabs will have to finance the entire Mars colony adventure through taxes and incentives and subsidies and whatnot.
There's also some concern for what life will actually be like for any poor sods actually stuck on Mars. Between the harsh conditions and what we know about the aspiring Emperor Musk of Mars, it's likely to make the Sea Org look like Butlin's.
Relatedly there are questions about why the whole project seems to assume that it's much more important to preserve the human species, like a celebrated breed of dog, than to protect the lifespans (ideally, healthy lifespans) and welfare of individual human beings, questions which unfortunately can also probably be answered with reference to Musk personally: https://youtu.be/-VfYjPzj1Xw?t=18 .
There's also the wrinkle that if it's viable to send settlers and adequate resupply to Mars, then it's probably much easier and more straightforward to send a few nuclear warheads on their own one-way trip, so the whole premise that a Martian colony wouldn't be struck in a full-scale nuclear war on Earth seems shaky. Now a Martian colony dug in deep under the surface might be relatively safe, but that brings up again the question of whether it wouldn't just be better to build a far-flung network of underground settlements on Earth and/or have submarines loitering in the Antarctic Ocean in shifts.
What if I told you every bucket within about 4 light years of us is known to have no water, no air, and hot/cold as hell? And even the worst part of the current bucket is better than any other bucket we know of?
Speaking as a bucket who, within, holds many crabs, I think the crabs inside me could make me (the bucket) MUCH nicer than any of these other, more desolate, buckets nearby. Instead of investing untold wealth into navigating towards these far off buckets that currently are full of holes, and cannot house crabs, it would be much cheaper to make me (the bucket the crabs are in) very nice for all of the crabs.
It's silly to me that some crabs are working on trying to leave the nice bucket (me, where all the crabs are) for some shoddy bucket far far away. All because they don't want to fix the bucket they have at hand.
I was all for going multi-planet until I realized the second part of the plan was “and fuck the planet we’re on now.” I’m afraid the second part is coming along much faster than the first.
Elon is the world's biggest stan (who is actually doing things rather than just talking about it) for solar power and electrification of transport, how is that a call for inaction?
A funny thing I like to do with people like this is point out the fact that Elon has perhaps done more than any person in history to get humans off of fossil fuels. And then when they sputter in disagreement I always like to ask who they'd propose instead. If they have any answer at all they inevitably give the name of a person who just demands that someone else do something (e.g. an activist or media figure), never actually someone who has put their time, effort and money into building a better system.
I think there are so many more mission objectives for success, e.g., still in payload deploy. I think we've already reached a lot of milestones with this launch, but there's still a lot of satellites to go at the time of writing. I'm so used to these failing that I'm holding my breath until everything is done.
There is a cadre of left wing Elon haters on HN. Ruins every thread related to Tesla/SpaceX, just emotional posts about their hatred of Elon, pretty sad really given Elon arguably works within the pinnacle of tech.
There is a cadre of right wing Elon simps on HN. Ruins every thread related to Tesla/SpaceX, just emotional posts about their love of Elon, pretty sad really given Elon arguably uses other people to make himself look good.
Only a certain type of person likes hard challenges, and many people are content chasing what is easy.
It's why everyone wants to work on software instead of hardware. Doing hard things is hard, and most people are incapable or unwilling to do the hard things. Prompt engineering is great for lazy morons.
Ship will also have to be outfitted with a life-support system ahead of crewed missions, which could be coming relatively soon. For example, NASA picked Ship to the be the first crewed lunar lander for its Artemis program, which aims to land people on the moon for the first time in 2028 on the Artemis IV mission.
Don't worry, there is absolutely no chance this will happen in 2028. There are many detailed takedowns of why the "Human Landing System" schedule is preposterous, but here's HN's idlewords:
There is (2 minutes before Flight 14, maybe it changes in 10 minutes) low chance, but not no chance.
> This would be an ambitious but achievable cadence for Starship, particularly if the tanker Starships didn’t have to be reusable, and could be made without a heat shield or control surfaces. Just how much time SpaceX has to reach this cadence is an interesting question, since right now NASA and SpaceX are locked in a game of chicken around who can commit to the least realistic timeline. But it probably has to get in gear by early 2027.
This is good evaluation. A launch every week in 2027 is ambitious, but not impossible.
The last few missions have been successful at the primary objectives so there's not necessarily a pressing need to fix anything before the next launch.
They seem to have reached near-orbit with one vacuum engine failing. Lets see if they decide to go all the way to orbit or if the failure causes an abort.
What was interesting is how short the single engine burn was to bring it from suborbital to orbital. It was just a few seconds. I'm not even sure I saw the altitude change.
Orbital insertion burns do not have to change the current altitude, their only required role is purely about adding speed to the orbit bringing up the altitude of the orbit's periapsis (lowest point of the current orbit) from inside the atmosphere to roughly the current altitude (or above).
Yeah it's a great way to learn a small bit of the unintuitive aspects of spaceflight. Though real launches follow a much more refined trajectory than most KSP but yeah the basic steps are still the same, though often blended together IRL due to limits on deep throttling and available relights for real rocket engines (though with mods you too can experience the need to do that in KSP, along with fun problems like ullage burns to settle fuel).
You should try out Kerbal Space Program you'll learn all about it. The rocket is perpendicular to the ground so the burn adds speed, and altitude on the other side of the orbit.
I haven't watched the footage yet, but if they were already at apopasis (highest point in orbit), orbital insertion would primarily raise the periapsis (lowest point) on the other side of the planet, so very little altitude change would be seen. It would be mostly an increase in velocity.
I think the mission was deliberately designed to get to just-below-orbit, have a decision point, and then proceed to orbit. So thats why it was a short burn. Because just-below-orbit is safer if anything goes wrong, they had a little pause.
edit: Also, Orbit is mostly a sideways speed thing rather than a height thing. The aim is to be "going sideways so fast that even though you are falling, you keep missing"
It certainly is, but my mind is more boggled by the Saturn V that did it 60 years ago. Space launch technology feels like it had a 30 year gap, as in, nothing significant happened between the Space Shuttle and the Falcon 9. And now, we are just catching up. Not just SpaceX, there is also Blue Origin, Rocketlab,... and everything that's happening in China.
An by the way, the whole point of Starship is not just doing it, it is doing it cheaply (by space standards). The whole reusability thing is part of it, and so is the "assembly line" approach that lets SpaceX treat their experimental rockets like fireworks. If the goal was just to lift a lot of mass off the ground, it is not even a great design, reusability in particular is costly in terms of payload capacity.
It's incredible to witness what humanity is capable of when pushed to our limits and appropriately motivated. The space race was in many ways a civilizational and existential fight for the U.S. The innovations this spurred in a relatively short span of time (and the risks the astronauts took) are numerous and impressive. I sometimes wonder that if in the absence of adversity, humans tend towards comfort and security and stability. Maybe that's obvious. Maybe most people with full bellies, warm homes, and physical security just aren't motivated to work 16 hour days for years on end and risk lives.
I suppose we should be grateful that SpaceX has found and collected enough of these crazy people in one place on this mission.
One thing that made me realize the scale of the Apollo project was the "rubber room". This is a bunker connected by a slide to the launch pad. It was designed as an emergency escape in case of an imminent explosion.
At a normal scale, that would be a major construction project.
At Apollo scale, it is an anecdote. Its purpose is to maybe save a few people in the unlikely scenario where an explosion gives enough advance warning to be able to use the slide, but not enough to be able to just drive away. It also goes to show that the program was anything but reckless.
An interesting theory. Intelligence tends towards entropy in the absence of exciting stimuli. Maybe life on Earth has just been so besieged over the eons that it has forced us to progress to where we are. Once we reach [Wall-E levels of comfort and abundance,](https://corporalculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/walle...) we're doomed. Maybe we're already seeing this with the fertility crisis.
If you get the chance to see it in person, it's an experience. The best way I can describe it is that looking from Isla Blanca beach, it looks like a skyscraper sitting on the pad, and then, the impossible happens -- the skyscraper lifts off into the sky.
Yes. The Starship program is pushing the limits of engineering, if it fails today it doesn't make it unimpressive
I'd also consider the attempts at fusion energy to be very impressive engineering projects even though none have them have yielded a stable source of fusion energy
I think for a sense of scale if this works as the SpaceX team wants, they will be able to launch more mass to orbit in a single day than all payloads ever before 2022 (rough math). And at a cost roughly 1/100th the prior average.
Also getting to "orbit" is a huge feat, because you need to be going over 17,500 mph (28,000 km/h), get into a designated orbit, and in this case, they're also deploying starlink satellites.
This rocket is the largest rocket ever made by humans, and the largest to even reach orbit, which is insane considering it's by a private company and not a national space program.
Does someone know where to watch the official livestream? The internet is so swarmed with all the recasters I cannot find the official stream anymore...
My experience however is that NASASpaceflight provides an overall better coverage than the official stream, only recasting when they don't have camera angles themselves (Such as when the ship is in space or during reentry)
I got them but with a 10 second delay compared to the spacex feed, which was irritating but meant I could flip between the "official" commentary and NASASpaceflight.
There was a bit of snark from the SpaceX guy Dave about whether or not the go/no-go decision had been made and not to listen to "other broadcasters" and he was right.
But the NASASpaceFlight guys are the right kind of nerds to be commentating, because they don't have to keep up the "steel jawed rocketman" image and can just geek out on the launch.
Yeah, the NSF cast quality is more amateurish, and certain cast members aren't that good at doing live casting. But it's nice listening to like minded people. And their camera shots are beautiful.
Yeah but it's just a white-labelled version of the X stream with all its warts.
ETA: Sorry this was ambiguous, I'm complaining that the stream on spacex.com uses x.com, whereas there used to be a much better stream through youtube.com
That's the opposite of the criticism that was levelled at him, during earlier launches, when he was preferring his own cameras even though they only caught fog.
I use to watch the nasaspaceflight and everyday astronaut streams but the official one is best for the actual launch. The other two are good for the commentary because if you ask a question in the chat they’ll sometimes answer it.
Having an impossible critical path will be the demise of the starship project. Too many things have to work that cannot be tested out of order. Too many of those things that needed to work years ago still don't. And those are the easy ones.
The items I'm listing here are just a subset of the critical path, and each milestone along the way will take months, optimistically, and years more realistically. To the point that starship won't be relevant to moon missions or any commercial use by the time it does what it needs to do to even partially fulfill the plans for it:
It needs to meet payload specifications. Currently it is off by a factor of two, which sounds doable until you realize the spec is 100 tons, and they need to find 50 tons more capacity by shedding weight elsewhere in the system.
It needs a launch cadence fast enough so that refueling doesn't take 15 separate starship tankers. Currently it would take years to refuel one single starship to make a one-way trip to the moon.
There's just a minor milestone on the way to that launch cadence: catching both stages.
Once both stages are reliably caught after a mission, refurbishment needs to be minimal. Proving that out will take several missions.
This is a simplified list of items on the critical path, but reaching each of these items has risks, and if those risks prove to be problems to solve, then each of those problems has a list of tasks and tests associated with it.
Some people think very highly of Elon for proposing technologically elegant solutions. But he's got a really big blind spot for the project management implications.
I'm saddened by this comment being upvoted a lot on this site. I'm a space nerd from EU and have been watching SpX since they were launching from an atol. This comment is the epitome of clueless negativity, wrapped in an umbrella of big words and a list of things that are neither important nor factually correct.
Nothing listed in this comment is going to lead to "the demise of the starship project". And nothing listed there is original. We've heard it time and time again, when F9 was ready to launch, when F9 was ready to land, when F9 did land (bbbut they have to do it constantly), when F9 managed the first re-use (they need to do it at least 10 times so it's worth it) and so on and so forth.
They've now launched AND landed >600 times already. Let's just say they know what they're doing.
Anyway, for a bit of context: the current first orbital flight, with 26 satellites deploying right now, is adding the same amount of Starlink bandwidth as 10+ F9 launches. Let that sink in and re-do whatever cost/opportunity and "management" spiels you need to do. One flight > 10x F9 flights.
That alone justifies the Starship. The rest is the cherry on top.
...keeping whatever project that should've been put to sleep months ago alive. Most people reading this have been on a software development project that fits this pattern of ignoring massively missed milestones and hoping to catch up. That's often accompanied by isolated economic arguments that are fragments of what started out as a coherent business case that can no longer be supported.
They've reached orbit, and at the time of this comment are preparing to deploy Starlink sats. Which means they've successfully closed the economic development loop for the Starship program. Falcon 9 can't launch Starlink v3, only Starship can. They've already demonstrated successful booster catch. Even if they discard Ship in the ocean after every launch they're no worse off than with Falcon 9 (which also discards it's upper stage).
They'll ramp falcon flights down quickly. Ramp up Starship launches just as quickly. And in a couple years time we'll have a blooper reel like this one but larger by 10x: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvim4rsNHkQ
I'm glad they gathered the courage to go for orbit and launched these v3 satellites so they can test real deployment of starlink v3. A bit of a cliffhanger for a few moments there. The starlink v3 direct-to-cell coverage will be a big upgrade when it comes online, allowing users without a terminal to use the constellation. And the laser based inter satellite communication is a big upgrade to how v3 can communicate. The catch, landing and recovery of both stages will be big next steps.
SpaceX knows that pulling the risk out of system is the ask here and they continue to progress and push their limits and capabilities, which is a healthy sign for the US space industry and more broadly for technical progress worldwide.
Now the goalposts for Starship is just whether it can put Starlink into orbit?
You seem to be suggesting that Starship just needs to self-fund its own development, and then the question of whether that development leads somewhere desirable/valuable is de facto answered or irrelevant. Why would that be the case?
> You seem to be suggesting that Starship just needs to self-fund its own development, and then the question of whether that development leads somewhere desirable/valuable is de facto answered or irrelevant. Why would that be the case?
Now the point of economic sustainability was always putting Starlink into orbit. That's something people in the space community have said from the beginning.
And both the booster and the Starship itself have proven that they can get back to ground mostly intact. So its not like they are only working on 'getting to orbit'. And clearly it is leading something desirable if the have proven that they can basically land the second and first stage, something nobody else has ever achieved.
Question how fast they can make the turn around are still there along with other question. But once you can repeatably launch you can improve much faster as they did with Falcon 9. And you can do more and more tests in shorter time, accelerating development.
This post feels like written by a QA. This is their first semi operational flight . In its current state starship is a reason to be proud by any nation . It pushed science forward with cost and payload size never possible before . That’s only current state .
Raptor 3 has its only 3rd flight . That’s why the payload is “only” ~50t. Just for the reference, it’s already one of the most capable rocket in the world as of today , and even with partial reusability it has future.
They clearly doing rolling improvement , rollout and testing of many components of different readiness. Otherwise they will never ship anything.
Reusable falcon 9 boosters are an informative history: how many years did it take to successfully land a falcon 9 booster? Scale your expectations appropriately.
That's a bad comparison. Falcon 9 wasn't developed to be reusable. And it it didn't actually take that long. Also Starship has already proven that Starship booster can land. And Starship itself has cleanly landed on the ocean.
There is still a question about turnaround time, but just comparing the state now to early Falcon 9 is not accurate.
i personally wanted those to work (except Twitter, i believe social media is net net bad for society)... and yet i don't feel the need to jerk him off with my hands
> Boring Company is also on the path to being successful, it's just not advertised much.
ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!? It's a marketing gimmick with lower transport capacity than a horse and buggy (and similar travel speed!) that's distracting cities like Vegas and Nashville from actual public transit.
It's an abject failure.
> Hyperloop - this could still come after boring company succeeds.
Fsd is amazing. I use it daily, it completely changed my daily drive in that I don’t. All of my driving is now on fsd, I sit back and chill while the car takes me to my destination.
As far as space goes, there isn't any. The closest is Falcon Heavy, which turned out much more complicated and expensive than originally expected. But it flies.
> they need to find 50 tons more capacity by shedding weight elsewhere in the system
In it's current test iteration they are overengineering many parts and opting for heavier, cheaper versions since currently the ship gets thrown away each time. One example are the grid fins. On Falcon 9 they are made of titanium, but on Starship they are steel probably because it's just easier to work with and why put in extra effort for something that will end up in the gulf? If they just swap in titanium grid fins they'll save 3 tons in the weight of the booster and even more fuel since that extra weight won't be getting carried up.
Deploying starlink satellites is the milestone that makes a viable project. Even if it fails on all remaining goals, it will continue flying regularly.
Putting Starlink sats in orbit is the economic engine that pays for Starship development and infrastructure build-out. You really think you get to skip straight to the end goal without establishing a way to fund it?
Saturn V was the culmination of a loooooong development history which included many rockets in the same family (hence the V), and some spectacular RUDs.
True, but ultimately Saturn V + Apollo was a stack intended to fly together, much like Booster + Starship. Both have/had to be reliable as a whole, with disastrous consequences if not. We can praise Saturn's V reliability, but it is just a part of the entire project, and it makes sense to judge the entire project as well.
That's an incredible achievement. But you seem to be ignoring the goals of Starship program - to make economically viable and reusable means of space transportation.
It's like after Jobs unveils iPhone to the world you'd comment that, meh, we could make telephone calls more than 100 years ago?
Gentle reminder that the Apollo project was eating about 0.5 percent of the entire US GDP yearly. That buys a lot of engineers and other capacity.
An equivalent of this would be about 160 billion USD a year today, and Starship is definitely at least an order of magnitude, perhaps two, cheaper than that.
Starship's commercial viability rests almost entirely on whether it can orbit Starlink satellites more cheaply than Falcon. Falcon is around $3000/kg, Starship was promised at $100/kg, I doubt even Elon believes that number but it does mean they have plenty of buffer and cutting capacity from 50T to 100T is not the end of the world.
I agree that the Human Landing System plan for the moon is a shitshow, but it's almost a distraction for SpaceX at this point, and it would not surprise me if the whole program gets axed by whoever comes after Trump.
Starlink is just the civil version of Starshield. As long as the US Army needs unrestricted internet access across the globe Starlink will continue to exist.
The elephant in the Starlink business model room is the fact that terrestrial wireless keeps getting cheaper and faster. To be a good Starlink customer you need to be prosperous enough to afford it, while being far enough away from an urban center to have little or no chance of being served by terrestrial wireless services.
That's a very special TAM to begin with, and the harsh part is that it shrinks over time.
The vast majority of that market is too poor to afford Starlink and as soon as they're not, their top priority will be to invest the capex to replace it with the vastly superior terrestrial modalities.
>Selling sub-fiber Internet access into a globe increasingly covered in fiber is a silly long-term value proposition.
Wow, that's so amazing estaerum, you've figured out how to get photonic-bandgap (hollow core) fiber to transoceanic airlines and ships, as well as drones, and satellites in orbit!? Would you mind sharing any hints on this great breakthrough you've made?
...or did you just sorta somehow completely ignore the whole "terminals can be mobile" aspect of Starlink, as well as latency of free space optical vs conventional fiber?
Starlink has about 13 million subscribers today and makes around 500$/year net on average per subscriber.
It's still growing fast and will get faster and more reliable. You will also be able to use from your phone quite soon.
It can very realistically get to 100 million subscribers which is going to generate 50 billion/year of profit. They have 0 competition in that space. Even if they make half of that it's still a 1 trillion dollar company right there.
You are saying "sub-fiber" but Starlink will likely be faster for long round trips once enough new gen satellites are deployed.
That comes before the whole datacenters in space conversation.
I wonder how this type of comment would apply to software development world where something innovative is being built, currently not ideal but the devs would just look at it: Meh, it doesn't do X, it doesn't do Y, it does Z worse and it doesn't send email!
Maybe AI applies here - from a few years of supercharged intellisense to builds stuff on its own. But even here I don't remember such a skepticism some folks are aiming at Starship.
It's like running into R&D department and just pointing out at the flaws/not implemented features while you iterate on your product. Annoying.
AI and the success of agentic coding is an excellent example. It works because validation is external to the AI coding process. If it had to validate itself it wouldn't work. Luckily, humans created a lot of tools to validate the work of humans. If your use case doesn't match the characteristics of agentic coding, don't expect the same success. That kind of serendipity is rare when conditions for it are good, and the conditions for serendipity around rockets is never that good.
"Currently it is off by a factor of two, which sounds doable until you realize the spec is 100 tons, and they need to find 50 tons more capacity by shedding weight elsewhere in the system."
You can probably prolong the stack, exactly as they did with Falcon. Also, Raptor 3 is more powerful than previous models, and I would expect future Raptor 4 to add some oomph as well.
"But he's got a really big blind spot for the project management implications."
Uh, isn't Starbase evidence to the contrary? They can produce rockets and rocket engines faster than anyone else in the world. And Raptor unit cost is ridiculously low for a liquid rocket engine.
I tuned in at T+11 just in time to hear the announcer talking about splashdown in the Indian ocean and that they weren't going to orbit today, followed immediately by saying the team is still considering options and trying to find a way to get to orbit. We'll see what happens.
They're being careful because they don't want to wreck their launch pad.
On the previous flight, they were going for the same ocean soft landing as this flight, but several engines on the booster failed to start during the landing burn (reportedly due to ice clogging propellant feed). Had this crash not happened they likely would have tried for a tower catch today.
They want to be sure the mitigation for this failure worked before they put the pad & tower at risk.
In one sense, yes. But Elon's PoV is "I have a big Booster factory, I'm a trillionaire, and my unit cost is under $50M." Vs. fixing a smashed Tower (and surrounding launch infrastructure) would likely cost him months.
Same with data centres in space, "Noooooo it cant work, heating in space, blah blah" same people, will never achieve anything in life as they only see limits.
To be fair, radiators in space doesn't require any new technology. It's a very well understood problem. The best method is infrared radiators. Cooling is just a function of how large the surface area of the radiators, their heat, and the cooling required.
Where I think you're correct is that typical AI data centers require a LOT of cooling, and to achieve this at scale would require enormous radiators. So large that it's hard to square the business case given current launch costs. I've read a lot of research in this space and it looks like the much more realistic use cases (at least at first) will be sub-processing. Meaning processing data already in space. These could be telemetry, Starlink, tracking, telescopes, logistics, military, GPS, weather, deep space missions, first-response, alerts, etc. In particular, applications which require lower latency.
There are also other applications which are less cost sensitive. For example, applications which might be banned on Earth, or at risk of espionage, attack, or intrusion.
If we want to make typical AI data centers in space to be economical, we need launch costs to drop to under $200/kg. Interestingly, [Starship could reduce costs down to $67/kg.] Even lower with >9 launch cycles. (https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/rocket-developers-used...) This would make the business case *extremely* attractive.
Great comment and I agree with all of it except you're describing an expanded starlink rather than "datacenters in space". There are definitely workloads that benefit from being in space but that's different from being an economical place to put a rack of H200s doing training or inference.
Dissipating that much heat in the first place would be a first, you also need a butt ton of power so maybe you can shade your giant radiators with giant solar panels, but all of this needs to unfold from something launch-packaged.... AND be cheaper than just plugging them in on earth.
I agree on all points. That said, we're seeing a lot of preparatory activity from many places. SpaceX, Google, Starcloud, Blue Origin, Cowboy Space, Orbital Compute, Odyssey, and China’s ADA Space/Zhejiang Lab. SpaceX and Blue Origin have filed plans for huge orbital compute constellations. Google is developing TPU-equipped satellites under Project Suncatcher. Starcloud has already flown an Nvidia H100 in orbit. China’s ADA Space has also launched a small network of AI-compute satellites. A lot of very smart and very rich people are making big bets in this space.
We're still a few years away, but I suspect this is going to happen fast, starting with the edge/low latency compute.
Starlink is "networking in space". The compute, power, and heat stories are minor compared to the networking benefits. Different story than making compute cheaper in space.
A better comparison would be Starlink, which had a bunch of unresolved problems and had to be more economical than existing satellite internet providers.
"It's unreasonable to say starship can't work in a world where the Saturn V did work."
Most of the doubts were economical as well. Saturn V was extremely expensive, its per-unit cost could be expressed in still-human-readable fractions of the entire US GDP. Starship should be several orders of magnitude cheaper while providing more capabilities.
You’re right, I’m just back from the city, took no time and was so cheap thanks to the hyperloop. Next week I go to Asia, I think I will use the rocket transport system Musk announced a few years ago. It’s so nice how my Tesla is making me so much money while I’m traveling, offering taxi service to everybody around. Next will I will get the add-on to have it join the Tesla compute fleet - it’s free compute if you think about it, given the solar roof is generating the energy! Might even get one of those humanoid robot to replace me at work. Just hope it’s not raining too much, my cybertruck steel plates are rusting a bit. Also, my kids are really enjoying their summer camp at the Mars colony!
Limits are security. Dont have to do this, don't have to risk that, no need for uncertainty, anxiety won't kill the weak confused mind...you can't fail if you never try (big brain!). That's the type. It is called cowards ;)
planned 6 orbits, 10hr's in space
the load of satelites will deploy 10x the banwidth of a single falcon launch making the economics of this venture rather startling for any 'competition'.
if they nail the deploy, relights, and soft landings, it will time for everybody to rethink everything *
* keep in mind they are already tinkering with on orbit fuel tranfer technology, which will lead to routine bunkering *
other things, like doing visual condition inspections of every ship in orbit means there experience base grows at a rate that other companys litteraly cant imagine.
Not a fan of Elon Musk at all, but SpaceX is damn impressive. Watching these key launches always makes me emotional for our species and what we can accomplish together.
At their bleeding edge, yes. Further back - their Falcon launch system is delivering far more reliably, frequently, and economically than any other launch system on Earth.
And that I've heard, actual buyers of launch services are perfectly aware of that distinction.
Starship is not yet reusable but they have the MVP and a fantastic position to iterate forward.
-- they have an orbital launcher with the largest diameter cargo bay
-- larger sats have bigger antennas and bigger PV area and more bus power. this scales as diam^2
-- 26 x Starlink v3 ~40-65 tons to LEO
-- every launch generates revenue, locks out the orbit for competitors.
-- they can launch more volume, more mass and cheaper than anyone else by a large margin
-- the design is validated - things will work
-- there is technical debt, issues but the rocket did the job
Caveats
-- timelines for full reusability are optimistic etc
-- there will be other issues in scaling to launching gigawats into orbit
-- cooling will have to be
-- Musk might go Full Villan mode before the thing works
[meta] I really didn't like that other negative comment getting voted to the top. Looks like it's made by someone who never worked in a bigco. For every bigco I worked, at any time there were hundreds if not thousands of open issues. You could list them and try arguing the company is about to fail and you'd scare people who don't know better.
It's the judgement of the severity of the issue that matters not #no_of_issues. And if there were 0 issues would our job exist?
[edit] getting the formatting right is very hard, maybe we could get a preview / TinyMCE ?
Distillation: Stream starts in about 1hr. Payload is 26 starlink v3 satellites.
Launch window is 8:15 AM to 9:30 AM eastern time.
Superheavy will land 7min after launch. Starship lands 9hrs post launch.
Edit: Both will be splashdowns (originally said they'll be caught)
https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1qxvvenMPMQxB
https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-14
The live channel has some video of recovery of the last starship which is pretty cool - it remained floating so they crawled up and removed some of the tiles to see how they performed, and actually reinstalled a few of them for the upcoming flight. So this mission will actually see some of the tiles flying for a second time.
Those were parts taken from this video: https://www.spacex.com/content/starship/holy-grail-of-rocket...
> Both expected to be caught by chopsticks. Will be a first for Starship.
SpaceX's flight profile says both are splashdowns?
Article must be wrong.
That is operational flights, today’s is still a test. Splashdowns today.
> Payload is 26 starlink v3 satellites.
F9 fits how many?
>>Payload is 26 starlink v3 satellites.
>F9 fits how many?
Zero. Starlink v3 is too big for the F9 payload fairing. It's not just a matter of mass, the diameter and overall volume is important as well. In terms of performance, last I read they're supposed to add 1 Tbps of capacity each, so assuming they all work the first time all 26 would be around 10x the network addition of a full F9 v2 Mini launch. But the larger antennas would have other advantages beyond sheer bandwidth, and they'll be able to start getting more serious about direct to cell.
29 v2 satellites (around 4 times lighter than v3)
Yeah and v3 has 10x downlink capacity and 20x uplink capacity of the v2.
I think somebody on the livestream said 60x capacity over Falcon.
I’m a bit saddened this thread has so little activity, 55 comments as of posting, here even though there are half a million people watching the spacex stream. Just watching the launch, the amount of technology and people involved is incredible.
Prompting claude 5.5 has more appeal it seems.
Hard to get sincerely engaged when the genuine achievement is surrounded by insanity like mars colonization or gigawatt datacenters in orbit, both in a decade.
I'm watching in awe and not worrying about the malcontents that can't leave their politics at the door and celebrate genuine achievement.
This is ballistics weapons technology, being progressed by a country that can't stop missile striking people, who has recently declared its intent to heavily weaponize space, whose leader has recently "claimed the moon", who is actively declaring its desire to annex its own allies, done by a corporation whose profits will be almost exclusively concentrated in a very small group of the already-wealthy in a country with horrific wealth disparity.
The V-2 was also a technological achievement. Doesn't mean the UK was cheering it on.
Starship wouldn't be a very effective missile IMO.
Depends which alpha version of Full Self Driving it has installed.
> This is ballistics weapons technology
It's like a thousand different technologies, some ancient some relatively new. I don't precisely delight in my new space overlords, but I can still wonder at the enormous object being launched into space!
Calm down. V-2 was a missile whose very design intent was to kill people.
If Starship ever kills people, it will be a disaster, but not intent.
This will help grow Starlink. Plenty of people are already enjoying their Starlink connection in places where the previous provider had either absurdly low quality for high price, or where connectivity was not a thing at all.
I for one am happy that kids living in remote villages can now access online schools and sick people can consult their problems at least with some online doctor. Sailors are pretty happy too.
All rocket development is weapons development, which is why ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations) classifies rocket and space tech as sensitive national security items and is why foreign nationals can't even work on Starship. The entire US space program was funded for military development in the first place.
The difference between Starship and a missile designed to kill people is a simple swapping of the payload. More realistically given vehicle costs, its an ideal heavy lift platform for cheaply placing other weapon vehicles into orbit - a stated goal of the current administration.
> This will help grow Starlink. Plenty of people are already enjoying their Starlink connection in places where the previous provider had either absurdly low quality for high price, or where connectivity was not a thing at all.
Plenty of people are also using Starlink to wage war, and its already become political as access is provided and removed at whim.
I love space. I love space technology. I work on a game set in space. I am not enthusiastic about notorious individuals having the will and capability to mass-weaponize space.
Almost every technology can be used to wage war. But not all war activities are evil. I am happy that the Ukrainians can use Starlink to defend themselves against a brutal aggressor and preserve sovereignty of their country.
"The difference between Starship and a missile designed to kill people is a simple swapping of the payload."
If you insist on this worldview, you will always be miserable around every technological development out there. Just imagine what can be done with mRNA or maybe 3D printing.
"I am not enthusiastic about notorious individuals having the will and capability to mass-weaponize space."
I am pretty sure that militarization of space will be a decision of governments, not Musk himself. He is not rich enough to be able to build an actual orbital army and not get arrested.
Unless by a "notorious individual" you mean Trump or Xi... in which case, there isn't much new under the sun, because governments have weaponized space since the very beginning.
What I feel is positive is the civilian use of the technology. The military use will always be there, but the civilian use needs better and cheaper tech, which is what Starship is. Some medications could be produced in the orbit for example, and with enough launch capacity, they could be produced for the entire planet at once.
The challenge is launching things into orbit is politics, aka how humans should organize society.
So it's hard to leave that out. It's genuine achievement and it's politics, both.
That doesn't make much sense, a previously private corporation (which just recently went public) is achieving economical launch to orbit and has made continual progress on that front over decades while politics has both worked for and against them. To me, that is a refutation of "launching things into orbit is politics" especially when you compare the very politically entangled incumbents' launch cadence and capacity.
Orbit is a global public commons, how is it not a political issue? It can be a political issue AND an engineering marvel, regardless of what other organizations are doing
This is nonsense, obviously, but is a perfect validation of his point. Well done and enjoy the show!
Everything is political, even your stance that it isn’t
A ridiculous claim. The cry of an infant is political? My houseplant? Fixing a buffer overflow?
Not everything but way more things than most people want to admit because so many of us have collapsed "political" into meaning "partisan."
Yeah like how the Nazis celebrated rocketry. You can’t decouple being an asshole.
For all very real SpaceX achievements there's certain Musk fatigue if you haven't noticed. He's done enormous job to sour people on the idea of becoming multiplanetary species.
Speaking as a crab in a bucket, for all the very real WorldX achievements there's a certain Muskcrab fatigue if you haven't noticed. He's done enormous job to sour fellow crabs on the idea of leaving this bucket.
The biggest issue is the whole idea of colonizing Mars or anywhere else as a backup runs into a couple major issues. 1) These backups are going to be extremely dependent on Earth for supplies because the alternative is replicating a tiny version of the whole planet's industrial base which will only make economic sense if transporting goods between these locations is extremely expensive, which is something that makes setting them up in the first place also prohibitively expensive. 2) Any technology that makes Mars/Space/etc survivable also makes it possible for an Earth based civilization able to survive basically any calamity up to the death of the Sun.
To your first point: yes, that's the whole idea and it's been the same playbook for any colony from the Americas to Australia. Mars is a much bigger challenge but our technology has advanced enough to make this possible. Let those who would dare risk their lives to achieve something great do so. If you don't want to participate then you don't have to, this isn't a national or international project so you can safely sit it out.
To your second: there are calamities for which a second self-sufficient planet would be necessary. A large asteroid impact would utterly wreck the global industrial base which is highly dependent on international trade and specialization of resource extraction and manufacturing in different regions of the world, having an independent backup on a different planet is one of the few ways to hedge against this. You could argue that every country on earth be fully self-sufficient and then maybe they could survive but that seems like a much bigger task since you'd be building multiple completely independent civilizations instead of just one. Guarding against another global pandemic is another and being out of range of nuclear weapons and their fallout is a third.
The point on the first is the offworld colony is not a backup if it cannot be self sufficient and requires critical materials from Earth. Colonies like Australia also weren't meant or built to be self sufficient, they were extractive, extending the military reach of the British Empire and bringing in resources to make it rich. If the goal is a "backup" civilization it needs to be self sufficient for a long period to allow it to "restore" to Earth...
> A large asteroid impact would utterly wreck the global industrial base which is highly dependent on international trade and specialization of resource extraction and manufacturing in different regions of the world
That's economic collapse not extinction level collapse, space based mining might help with that but it's not the kind of event that actually makes a self sufficient
> Guarding against another global pandemic is another
This kind of presumes a very low level of travel and trade between Earth and Elsewhere which is extremely unlikely per problem 1 and the fact they'll need some economic reason to exist, at the very least they'll have to make money to buy the necessary items from Earth they cannot produce locally.
> being out of range of nuclear weapons and their fallout is a third.
This goes back to the actual thing I was talking about even a heavily bombed out Earth is hundreds of times easier to survive on than Mars or any given asteroid. Hence any tech that makes those places survivable make even the most damaged Earth also survivable.
I bet an underlying thought is that we crabs will have to finance the entire Mars colony adventure through taxes and incentives and subsidies and whatnot.
There's also some concern for what life will actually be like for any poor sods actually stuck on Mars. Between the harsh conditions and what we know about the aspiring Emperor Musk of Mars, it's likely to make the Sea Org look like Butlin's.
Relatedly there are questions about why the whole project seems to assume that it's much more important to preserve the human species, like a celebrated breed of dog, than to protect the lifespans (ideally, healthy lifespans) and welfare of individual human beings, questions which unfortunately can also probably be answered with reference to Musk personally: https://youtu.be/-VfYjPzj1Xw?t=18 .
There's also the wrinkle that if it's viable to send settlers and adequate resupply to Mars, then it's probably much easier and more straightforward to send a few nuclear warheads on their own one-way trip, so the whole premise that a Martian colony wouldn't be struck in a full-scale nuclear war on Earth seems shaky. Now a Martian colony dug in deep under the surface might be relatively safe, but that brings up again the question of whether it wouldn't just be better to build a far-flung network of underground settlements on Earth and/or have submarines loitering in the Antarctic Ocean in shifts.
What if I told you every bucket within about 4 light years of us is known to have no water, no air, and hot/cold as hell? And even the worst part of the current bucket is better than any other bucket we know of?
Speaking as a bucket who, within, holds many crabs, I think the crabs inside me could make me (the bucket) MUCH nicer than any of these other, more desolate, buckets nearby. Instead of investing untold wealth into navigating towards these far off buckets that currently are full of holes, and cannot house crabs, it would be much cheaper to make me (the bucket the crabs are in) very nice for all of the crabs.
It's silly to me that some crabs are working on trying to leave the nice bucket (me, where all the crabs are) for some shoddy bucket far far away. All because they don't want to fix the bucket they have at hand.
I was all for going multi-planet until I realized the second part of the plan was “and fuck the planet we’re on now.” I’m afraid the second part is coming along much faster than the first.
How is that the second part of the plan?
Their plan calls for inaction towards issues that are making this planet increasingly worse for humans.
Elon is the world's biggest stan (who is actually doing things rather than just talking about it) for solar power and electrification of transport, how is that a call for inaction?
A funny thing I like to do with people like this is point out the fact that Elon has perhaps done more than any person in history to get humans off of fossil fuels. And then when they sputter in disagreement I always like to ask who they'd propose instead. If they have any answer at all they inevitably give the name of a person who just demands that someone else do something (e.g. an activist or media figure), never actually someone who has put their time, effort and money into building a better system.
Assuming you are talking about climate change: isn’t Tesla doing more than anyone to electrify everything and help fix the problem?
The plan definitely does not call for inaction towards other issues.
Like pioneering the first excellent electric car?
It probably doesn't help that it's mid working day for a large portion of the world, on a Monday as well.
We've been watching in the office though. There's been a lot of interest in it.
Czechia has a state holiday (St. Wenceslas), so people are watching :)
Very excited. Watching it with my wife. So glad it didn't have to end early.
I think there are so many more mission objectives for success, e.g., still in payload deploy. I think we've already reached a lot of milestones with this launch, but there's still a lot of satellites to go at the time of writing. I'm so used to these failing that I'm holding my breath until everything is done.
It's an early AM launch. Alarm clocks on the west coast haven't gone off yet
It's 6:30am here in CA, didn't get any indication it was going to be this early until I just saw this.
There is a cadre of left wing Elon haters on HN. Ruins every thread related to Tesla/SpaceX, just emotional posts about their hatred of Elon, pretty sad really given Elon arguably works within the pinnacle of tech.
SpaceX works at the pinnacle. Elon just goes into a K hole and comes up with ideas. Most of which are garbage.
The people doing the work at SpaceX should be applauded because they are pushing boundaries of science and technology.
There is a cadre of right wing Elon simps on HN. Ruins every thread related to Tesla/SpaceX, just emotional posts about their love of Elon, pretty sad really given Elon arguably uses other people to make himself look good.
Don't expect any sympathy for a guy who said if Trump lost, he'd be in jail. At least not from me.
rocket to orbit isn't that impressive. should have been 14 flights ago. Artemis SLS went to the moon in 1
Yes, clearly we should be using our stockpile of SLS rockets to launch satellites and go to the moon.
these satellites are junk anyway - and starship can't go to the moon lmao
> so little activity, 55 comments
???
I mean... I'm watching it. What's there to say? Who wants to argue with Musk/Trump/detractors and their bots.
"Prompting claude 5.5 has more appeal it seems."
Only a certain type of person likes hard challenges, and many people are content chasing what is easy.
It's why everyone wants to work on software instead of hardware. Doing hard things is hard, and most people are incapable or unwilling to do the hard things. Prompt engineering is great for lazy morons.
If it isn't human landing on Moon/Mars then I can wait for weekly space news write-up on Ars Technica.
Ship will also have to be outfitted with a life-support system ahead of crewed missions, which could be coming relatively soon. For example, NASA picked Ship to the be the first crewed lunar lander for its Artemis program, which aims to land people on the moon for the first time in 2028 on the Artemis IV mission.
Don't worry, there is absolutely no chance this will happen in 2028. There are many detailed takedowns of why the "Human Landing System" schedule is preposterous, but here's HN's idlewords:
https://mceglowski.substack.com/p/how-should-we-think-about-...
There is (2 minutes before Flight 14, maybe it changes in 10 minutes) low chance, but not no chance.
> This would be an ambitious but achievable cadence for Starship, particularly if the tanker Starships didn’t have to be reusable, and could be made without a heat shield or control surfaces. Just how much time SpaceX has to reach this cadence is an interesting question, since right now NASA and SpaceX are locked in a game of chicken around who can commit to the least realistic timeline. But it probably has to get in gear by early 2027.
This is good evaluation. A launch every week in 2027 is ambitious, but not impossible.
"A launch every week in 2027 is ambitious, but not impossible."
I don't think a week is enough to gather data and fix subsequent launch
They already leap frog fixes and improvements based on previous flights on all their launches.
Depends on what the issue is, but you don't need to apply fixes to the next launch. You test them when you can, which may tax a few launches.
The last few missions have been successful at the primary objectives so there's not necessarily a pressing need to fix anything before the next launch.
The official (completely unrealistic at this point) 2028 target is probably kept because Donald Trump's term ends in January 2029.
One can only hope
They could probably generate one with an AI model and he would believe it. No on e in his inner circle contradicts him anyway.
Don't you know that it's called "Super Intelligence" or SI now because Artificial sounds fake?
His lordship announced this to the world at the UN.
Surely AI stands for "American Intelligence"! Renaming incoming, Google will comply first.
They seem to have reached near-orbit with one vacuum engine failing. Lets see if they decide to go all the way to orbit or if the failure causes an abort.
Confirmed, orbit!
Hell yeah, that was the longest 10 minutes.
Abort confirmed :(
Update: Or maybe not? They're reviewing the status now.
Update 2: Go for orbit!
Update 3: Orbital insertion complete!!
Update 4: First Starlink satellites successfully deployed!
What was interesting is how short the single engine burn was to bring it from suborbital to orbital. It was just a few seconds. I'm not even sure I saw the altitude change.
Orbital insertion burns do not have to change the current altitude, their only required role is purely about adding speed to the orbit bringing up the altitude of the orbit's periapsis (lowest point of the current orbit) from inside the atmosphere to roughly the current altitude (or above).
Yup, Kerbal teaches you that very quickly. At the right spot in an orbit, the difference between touching water and infinite falling is very small.
Yeah it's a great way to learn a small bit of the unintuitive aspects of spaceflight. Though real launches follow a much more refined trajectory than most KSP but yeah the basic steps are still the same, though often blended together IRL due to limits on deep throttling and available relights for real rocket engines (though with mods you too can experience the need to do that in KSP, along with fun problems like ullage burns to settle fuel).
You should try out Kerbal Space Program you'll learn all about it. The rocket is perpendicular to the ground so the burn adds speed, and altitude on the other side of the orbit.
I haven't watched the footage yet, but if they were already at apopasis (highest point in orbit), orbital insertion would primarily raise the periapsis (lowest point) on the other side of the planet, so very little altitude change would be seen. It would be mostly an increase in velocity.
I think the mission was deliberately designed to get to just-below-orbit, have a decision point, and then proceed to orbit. So thats why it was a short burn. Because just-below-orbit is safer if anything goes wrong, they had a little pause.
edit: Also, Orbit is mostly a sideways speed thing rather than a height thing. The aim is to be "going sideways so fast that even though you are falling, you keep missing"
ooops - not giving up yet.
It’s a go!
> near-orbit with one vacuum engine failing
near-orbit was planned, they just had to burn longer. It's in the timeline: https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-14
But yeah, they had a big decision to make in those few minutes between engine cutoff ang insertion burn.
What an incredible feat of engineering, even if it doesn't make orbit. Just getting that much mass off the pad is mind-boggling.
It certainly is, but my mind is more boggled by the Saturn V that did it 60 years ago. Space launch technology feels like it had a 30 year gap, as in, nothing significant happened between the Space Shuttle and the Falcon 9. And now, we are just catching up. Not just SpaceX, there is also Blue Origin, Rocketlab,... and everything that's happening in China.
An by the way, the whole point of Starship is not just doing it, it is doing it cheaply (by space standards). The whole reusability thing is part of it, and so is the "assembly line" approach that lets SpaceX treat their experimental rockets like fireworks. If the goal was just to lift a lot of mass off the ground, it is not even a great design, reusability in particular is costly in terms of payload capacity.
The reusability is what made the rest of these investments possible. Musk is annoying, but you have to give him credit for it.
It's incredible to witness what humanity is capable of when pushed to our limits and appropriately motivated. The space race was in many ways a civilizational and existential fight for the U.S. The innovations this spurred in a relatively short span of time (and the risks the astronauts took) are numerous and impressive. I sometimes wonder that if in the absence of adversity, humans tend towards comfort and security and stability. Maybe that's obvious. Maybe most people with full bellies, warm homes, and physical security just aren't motivated to work 16 hour days for years on end and risk lives.
I suppose we should be grateful that SpaceX has found and collected enough of these crazy people in one place on this mission.
One thing that made me realize the scale of the Apollo project was the "rubber room". This is a bunker connected by a slide to the launch pad. It was designed as an emergency escape in case of an imminent explosion.
At a normal scale, that would be a major construction project.
At Apollo scale, it is an anecdote. Its purpose is to maybe save a few people in the unlikely scenario where an explosion gives enough advance warning to be able to use the slide, but not enough to be able to just drive away. It also goes to show that the program was anything but reckless.
On a smaller scale, driving through the mountains and seeing the tunnels where we said "screw it, we're going through" is also pretty amazing.
Maybe that’s the Great Filter?
An interesting theory. Intelligence tends towards entropy in the absence of exciting stimuli. Maybe life on Earth has just been so besieged over the eons that it has forced us to progress to where we are. Once we reach [Wall-E levels of comfort and abundance,](https://corporalculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/walle...) we're doomed. Maybe we're already seeing this with the fertility crisis.
"nothing significant happened between the Space Shuttle and the Falcon 9"
well US government found new toys (proxy war) instead of space
If you get the chance to see it in person, it's an experience. The best way I can describe it is that looking from Isla Blanca beach, it looks like a skyscraper sitting on the pad, and then, the impossible happens -- the skyscraper lifts off into the sky.
Well considering the point of it is the make orbit, it would be a bit useless if it didn't.
Would HN describe a huge program that didn't do the thing it was designed to do a "feat of engineering"?
Yes. The Starship program is pushing the limits of engineering, if it fails today it doesn't make it unimpressive
I'd also consider the attempts at fusion energy to be very impressive engineering projects even though none have them have yielded a stable source of fusion energy
Could someone give me a eli5 of what makes that launch impressive compared to other rocket launches?
It’s the largest, heaviest rocket ever, with double the thrust of the last record holder, and it is the first one that is supposed to be reusable.
It’s a lot of records that just got broken.
Thanks for actually answering
I think for a sense of scale if this works as the SpaceX team wants, they will be able to launch more mass to orbit in a single day than all payloads ever before 2022 (rough math). And at a cost roughly 1/100th the prior average.
Also getting to "orbit" is a huge feat, because you need to be going over 17,500 mph (28,000 km/h), get into a designated orbit, and in this case, they're also deploying starlink satellites.
This rocket is the largest rocket ever made by humans, and the largest to even reach orbit, which is insane considering it's by a private company and not a national space program.
36 full flow staged combustion engines all working is no easy feat
It’s big.
Blowing something up so hard it almost gets into space is a feat of engineering, even if all it does is rain debris from ahigh.
Does someone know where to watch the official livestream? The internet is so swarmed with all the recasters I cannot find the official stream anymore...
Edit: https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-14
Only on X, sadly.
My experience however is that NASASpaceflight provides an overall better coverage than the official stream, only recasting when they don't have camera angles themselves (Such as when the ship is in space or during reentry)
I got them but with a 10 second delay compared to the spacex feed, which was irritating but meant I could flip between the "official" commentary and NASASpaceflight.
There was a bit of snark from the SpaceX guy Dave about whether or not the go/no-go decision had been made and not to listen to "other broadcasters" and he was right.
But the NASASpaceFlight guys are the right kind of nerds to be commentating, because they don't have to keep up the "steel jawed rocketman" image and can just geek out on the launch.
Yeah, the NSF cast quality is more amateurish, and certain cast members aren't that good at doing live casting. But it's nice listening to like minded people. And their camera shots are beautiful.
The X video stream is flawless.
They have a stream on their page starting 40min before launch.
Also can recommend the restream of everyday astronaut Tim Dodd
Yeah but it's just a white-labelled version of the X stream with all its warts.
ETA: Sorry this was ambiguous, I'm complaining that the stream on spacex.com uses x.com, whereas there used to be a much better stream through youtube.com
Which warts? I mean if you dislike Space X, what do you expect to get from it at all?
The streams are great, I just wish they were streamed on youtube like they used to be.
That’s sounds perfect. No “commentators” no “own angles”, no “buy our merch”, no whining about “my crappy blackmagic camera may have been damaged”
That's the opposite of the criticism that was levelled at him, during earlier launches, when he was preferring his own cameras even though they only caught fog.
Here is the unofficial NASASpaceFlight stream: https://youtube.com/watch?v=9gDxG-pm1Zo
They are already live and have a lot of background discussion, unlike the official SpaceX stream.
> Only on X, sadly.
And it's SpaceX, not ESA, sadly.
YouTube rebroadcast of official SpaceX feed (h/t NasaSpaceFlight forums):
https://youtube.com/watch?v=fmkHjDeECps
Also hosted directly on SpaceX website:
https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-14
https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-14
I use to watch the nasaspaceflight and everyday astronaut streams but the official one is best for the actual launch. The other two are good for the commentary because if you ask a question in the chat they’ll sometimes answer it.
Having an impossible critical path will be the demise of the starship project. Too many things have to work that cannot be tested out of order. Too many of those things that needed to work years ago still don't. And those are the easy ones.
The items I'm listing here are just a subset of the critical path, and each milestone along the way will take months, optimistically, and years more realistically. To the point that starship won't be relevant to moon missions or any commercial use by the time it does what it needs to do to even partially fulfill the plans for it:
It needs to meet payload specifications. Currently it is off by a factor of two, which sounds doable until you realize the spec is 100 tons, and they need to find 50 tons more capacity by shedding weight elsewhere in the system.
It needs a launch cadence fast enough so that refueling doesn't take 15 separate starship tankers. Currently it would take years to refuel one single starship to make a one-way trip to the moon.
There's just a minor milestone on the way to that launch cadence: catching both stages.
Once both stages are reliably caught after a mission, refurbishment needs to be minimal. Proving that out will take several missions.
This is a simplified list of items on the critical path, but reaching each of these items has risks, and if those risks prove to be problems to solve, then each of those problems has a list of tasks and tests associated with it.
Some people think very highly of Elon for proposing technologically elegant solutions. But he's got a really big blind spot for the project management implications.
I'm saddened by this comment being upvoted a lot on this site. I'm a space nerd from EU and have been watching SpX since they were launching from an atol. This comment is the epitome of clueless negativity, wrapped in an umbrella of big words and a list of things that are neither important nor factually correct.
Nothing listed in this comment is going to lead to "the demise of the starship project". And nothing listed there is original. We've heard it time and time again, when F9 was ready to launch, when F9 was ready to land, when F9 did land (bbbut they have to do it constantly), when F9 managed the first re-use (they need to do it at least 10 times so it's worth it) and so on and so forth.
They've now launched AND landed >600 times already. Let's just say they know what they're doing.
Anyway, for a bit of context: the current first orbital flight, with 26 satellites deploying right now, is adding the same amount of Starlink bandwidth as 10+ F9 launches. Let that sink in and re-do whatever cost/opportunity and "management" spiels you need to do. One flight > 10x F9 flights.
That alone justifies the Starship. The rest is the cherry on top.
"That alone justifies..."
...keeping whatever project that should've been put to sleep months ago alive. Most people reading this have been on a software development project that fits this pattern of ignoring massively missed milestones and hoping to catch up. That's often accompanied by isolated economic arguments that are fragments of what started out as a coherent business case that can no longer be supported.
>should've been put to sleep months ago
The thing works and is launching satellites? And if they just continue as is it'll be the lowest cost per Kg to space?
Seems quite successful even if the moon landing doesn't happen.
They've reached orbit, and at the time of this comment are preparing to deploy Starlink sats. Which means they've successfully closed the economic development loop for the Starship program. Falcon 9 can't launch Starlink v3, only Starship can. They've already demonstrated successful booster catch. Even if they discard Ship in the ocean after every launch they're no worse off than with Falcon 9 (which also discards it's upper stage).
They'll ramp falcon flights down quickly. Ramp up Starship launches just as quickly. And in a couple years time we'll have a blooper reel like this one but larger by 10x: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvim4rsNHkQ
Edit: Starlink deployed.
I'm glad they gathered the courage to go for orbit and launched these v3 satellites so they can test real deployment of starlink v3. A bit of a cliffhanger for a few moments there. The starlink v3 direct-to-cell coverage will be a big upgrade when it comes online, allowing users without a terminal to use the constellation. And the laser based inter satellite communication is a big upgrade to how v3 can communicate. The catch, landing and recovery of both stages will be big next steps.
SpaceX knows that pulling the risk out of system is the ask here and they continue to progress and push their limits and capabilities, which is a healthy sign for the US space industry and more broadly for technical progress worldwide.
Now the goalposts for Starship is just whether it can put Starlink into orbit?
You seem to be suggesting that Starship just needs to self-fund its own development, and then the question of whether that development leads somewhere desirable/valuable is de facto answered or irrelevant. Why would that be the case?
> Now the goalposts
Milestones. Engineers deal in milestones. Goalposts are for sportsball.
So reply to the immediately following sentence that asks you to connect the milestone to the next.
Frankly that sentence doesn't make much sense. Would you mind rephrasing your question?
> You seem to be suggesting that Starship just needs to self-fund its own development, and then the question of whether that development leads somewhere desirable/valuable is de facto answered or irrelevant. Why would that be the case?
Reply please.
Now the point of economic sustainability was always putting Starlink into orbit. That's something people in the space community have said from the beginning.
And both the booster and the Starship itself have proven that they can get back to ground mostly intact. So its not like they are only working on 'getting to orbit'. And clearly it is leading something desirable if the have proven that they can basically land the second and first stage, something nobody else has ever achieved.
Question how fast they can make the turn around are still there along with other question. But once you can repeatably launch you can improve much faster as they did with Falcon 9. And you can do more and more tests in shorter time, accelerating development.
This post feels like written by a QA. This is their first semi operational flight . In its current state starship is a reason to be proud by any nation . It pushed science forward with cost and payload size never possible before . That’s only current state .
Raptor 3 has its only 3rd flight . That’s why the payload is “only” ~50t. Just for the reference, it’s already one of the most capable rocket in the world as of today , and even with partial reusability it has future.
They clearly doing rolling improvement , rollout and testing of many components of different readiness. Otherwise they will never ship anything.
I'm sure you also thought falcon was going to fail, Tesla would never work out, and Twitter would collapse after Elon bought it.
Cybertrucks, solar roofs and SolarCity failed just the same.
Cybertruck? The best selling electric truck on the market?
Best selling electic truck on the market? Doesn't seem like it: https://electrek.co/2026/01/13/ford-f150-lightning-outsold-t...
And the biggest customer is SpaceX: https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-bought-tesla-cybertru...
Oh, it's only the second best selling electric truck on the market. What a massive failure.
It sold so well that Musk had to have SpaceX buy up millions and millions worth of unsold inventory.
Reusable falcon 9 boosters are an informative history: how many years did it take to successfully land a falcon 9 booster? Scale your expectations appropriately.
That's a bad comparison. Falcon 9 wasn't developed to be reusable. And it it didn't actually take that long. Also Starship has already proven that Starship booster can land. And Starship itself has cleanly landed on the ocean.
There is still a question about turnaround time, but just comparing the state now to early Falcon 9 is not accurate.
But it happened still.
i personally wanted those to work (except Twitter, i believe social media is net net bad for society)... and yet i don't feel the need to jerk him off with my hands
Musk also has FSD, the Boring Company, Tesla Solar Roof, Cybertruck, Hyperloop, etc.
Let's stop pretending he's God.
FSD is on the path of being incredibly successful. You really have to try it, if you haven't already.
Boring Company is also on the path to being successful, it's just not advertised much.
Solar roof - yes, this one I would mark as a failure.
Cybertruck - they're still selling, so not a failure. But not as great as originally promised.
Hyperloop - this could still come after boring company succeeds.
Nobody is saying he's god. But maybe, he understands engineering better than some commenters on HN, that's all.
> Boring Company is also on the path to being successful, it's just not advertised much.
ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!? It's a marketing gimmick with lower transport capacity than a horse and buggy (and similar travel speed!) that's distracting cities like Vegas and Nashville from actual public transit.
It's an abject failure.
> Hyperloop - this could still come after boring company succeeds.
If my grandma had wheels, she'd be a bycicle.
We have truly lost the plot, oh well, once you make something part of your identity, reason won't take it out.
Fsd is amazing. I use it daily, it completely changed my daily drive in that I don’t. All of my driving is now on fsd, I sit back and chill while the car takes me to my destination.
The craziest part about FSD is that people still think it doesn't work.
The fact that you can pay the average price for a car, and get a car that fully drives itself today, is mind boggling.
Conveniently ignoring every of his failed projects, a timeless classic
Noted failure Babe Ruth struck out 1330 times, which was a record that lasted until Mickey Mantle failed even harder.
Failure is a part of life and is one aspect of our growth as humans. If one has never failed then one has probably never attempted to do much in life.
As far as space goes, there isn't any. The closest is Falcon Heavy, which turned out much more complicated and expensive than originally expected. But it flies.
> they need to find 50 tons more capacity by shedding weight elsewhere in the system
In it's current test iteration they are overengineering many parts and opting for heavier, cheaper versions since currently the ship gets thrown away each time. One example are the grid fins. On Falcon 9 they are made of titanium, but on Starship they are steel probably because it's just easier to work with and why put in extra effort for something that will end up in the gulf? If they just swap in titanium grid fins they'll save 3 tons in the weight of the booster and even more fuel since that extra weight won't be getting carried up.
If people didn't try things just because they were hard we'd all be ploughing fields right now
If people didn't recognize when projects became impossible to complete, Lotus Modern Jazz would've shipped in the last year.
For something impossible to complete, it sure seems to be deploying a lot of Starlink satellites.
Is deploying starlink satellites the end goal of Starship?
Deploying starlink satellites is the milestone that makes a viable project. Even if it fails on all remaining goals, it will continue flying regularly.
And it's amazing how much easier it is to test and iterate when you're making regular flights.
Putting Starlink sats in orbit is the economic engine that pays for Starship development and infrastructure build-out. You really think you get to skip straight to the end goal without establishing a way to fund it?
Uh huh.
Gentle reminder that Saturn 5 worked pretty much eprfectly on its maiden flight.
Saturn V was the culmination of a loooooong development history which included many rockets in the same family (hence the V), and some spectacular RUDs.
This comparison would make sense if we'd been giving Elon 5% of the federal budget like we did to the Apollo mission.
> Gentle reminder that Saturn 5 worked pretty much eprfectly on its maiden flight.
Yeah, except it costed 12x per-flight, ran at 30x/kg, and wasn't reusable. So not exactly the same thing.
And it sent 3 people to the moon and brought them back with no refueling.
60 years ago.
Saturn V worked well, but we seem to be forgetting that Apollo 1 killed three astronauts on Earth and Apollo 13 almost killed another three in space.
I never forget either. Both were failures of the command/service module design, not the rocket.
True, but ultimately Saturn V + Apollo was a stack intended to fly together, much like Booster + Starship. Both have/had to be reliable as a whole, with disastrous consequences if not. We can praise Saturn's V reliability, but it is just a part of the entire project, and it makes sense to judge the entire project as well.
That's an incredible achievement. But you seem to be ignoring the goals of Starship program - to make economically viable and reusable means of space transportation.
It's like after Jobs unveils iPhone to the world you'd comment that, meh, we could make telephone calls more than 100 years ago?
Gentle reminder that the Apollo project was eating about 0.5 percent of the entire US GDP yearly. That buys a lot of engineers and other capacity.
An equivalent of this would be about 160 billion USD a year today, and Starship is definitely at least an order of magnitude, perhaps two, cheaper than that.
Starship's commercial viability rests almost entirely on whether it can orbit Starlink satellites more cheaply than Falcon. Falcon is around $3000/kg, Starship was promised at $100/kg, I doubt even Elon believes that number but it does mean they have plenty of buffer and cutting capacity from 50T to 100T is not the end of the world.
I agree that the Human Landing System plan for the moon is a shitshow, but it's almost a distraction for SpaceX at this point, and it would not surprise me if the whole program gets axed by whoever comes after Trump.
It won't get axed, the race with China is on.
Its commercial viability (not program success) depends on Starlink launch, sure. But also: that depends on Starlink's viability and value.
Selling sub-fiber Internet access into a globe increasingly covered in fiber is a silly long-term value proposition.
Starlink is just the civil version of Starshield. As long as the US Army needs unrestricted internet access across the globe Starlink will continue to exist.
Is it? I think you might think differently if you challenge yourself to calculate the total addressable market for Starlink.
The elephant in the Starlink business model room is the fact that terrestrial wireless keeps getting cheaper and faster. To be a good Starlink customer you need to be prosperous enough to afford it, while being far enough away from an urban center to have little or no chance of being served by terrestrial wireless services.
That's a very special TAM to begin with, and the harsh part is that it shrinks over time.
The vast majority of that market is too poor to afford Starlink and as soon as they're not, their top priority will be to invest the capex to replace it with the vastly superior terrestrial modalities.
>Selling sub-fiber Internet access into a globe increasingly covered in fiber is a silly long-term value proposition.
Wow, that's so amazing estaerum, you've figured out how to get photonic-bandgap (hollow core) fiber to transoceanic airlines and ships, as well as drones, and satellites in orbit!? Would you mind sharing any hints on this great breakthrough you've made?
...or did you just sorta somehow completely ignore the whole "terminals can be mobile" aspect of Starlink, as well as latency of free space optical vs conventional fiber?
The market for airlines, ships, drones, and satellites is - quite obviously - nowhere near large enough to justify Starship lmao
80% of the Starlink subscriber base is fixed points and that will grow.
Starlink has about 13 million subscribers today and makes around 500$/year net on average per subscriber. It's still growing fast and will get faster and more reliable. You will also be able to use from your phone quite soon. It can very realistically get to 100 million subscribers which is going to generate 50 billion/year of profit. They have 0 competition in that space. Even if they make half of that it's still a 1 trillion dollar company right there.
You are saying "sub-fiber" but Starlink will likely be faster for long round trips once enough new gen satellites are deployed.
That comes before the whole datacenters in space conversation.
I wonder how this type of comment would apply to software development world where something innovative is being built, currently not ideal but the devs would just look at it: Meh, it doesn't do X, it doesn't do Y, it does Z worse and it doesn't send email!
Maybe AI applies here - from a few years of supercharged intellisense to builds stuff on its own. But even here I don't remember such a skepticism some folks are aiming at Starship.
It's like running into R&D department and just pointing out at the flaws/not implemented features while you iterate on your product. Annoying.
AI and the success of agentic coding is an excellent example. It works because validation is external to the AI coding process. If it had to validate itself it wouldn't work. Luckily, humans created a lot of tools to validate the work of humans. If your use case doesn't match the characteristics of agentic coding, don't expect the same success. That kind of serendipity is rare when conditions for it are good, and the conditions for serendipity around rockets is never that good.
The OP will go on or not, I don't need to think high or low of Mask
"Currently it is off by a factor of two, which sounds doable until you realize the spec is 100 tons, and they need to find 50 tons more capacity by shedding weight elsewhere in the system."
You can probably prolong the stack, exactly as they did with Falcon. Also, Raptor 3 is more powerful than previous models, and I would expect future Raptor 4 to add some oomph as well.
"But he's got a really big blind spot for the project management implications."
Uh, isn't Starbase evidence to the contrary? They can produce rockets and rocket engines faster than anyone else in the world. And Raptor unit cost is ridiculously low for a liquid rocket engine.
Status update: It launched. Looks very good so far. At nearly 100km altitude four minutes in, most engines nominal. Superheavy separated successfully.
Inspiring to watch, really.
7km/s, 26 sattelites currently deploying - super impressive!
I tuned in at T+11 just in time to hear the announcer talking about splashdown in the Indian ocean and that they weren't going to orbit today, followed immediately by saying the team is still considering options and trying to find a way to get to orbit. We'll see what happens.
T+22: Go for orbit!
Huge congratulations to the SpaceX team!
Why arnt they doing a tower catch ?
They're being careful because they don't want to wreck their launch pad.
On the previous flight, they were going for the same ocean soft landing as this flight, but several engines on the booster failed to start during the landing burn (reportedly due to ice clogging propellant feed). Had this crash not happened they likely would have tried for a tower catch today.
They want to be sure the mitigation for this failure worked before they put the pad & tower at risk.
Towers are expensive. Boosters are cheap. And the reliability metrics on low-serial-number Raptor 3's don't make the modest benefits worth the risk.
I would have thought both were kinda expensive.
In one sense, yes. But Elon's PoV is "I have a big Booster factory, I'm a trillionaire, and my unit cost is under $50M." Vs. fixing a smashed Tower (and surrounding launch infrastructure) would likely cost him months.
Watching that take off is breathtaking. I've been a space nerd since a little kid and I cannot believe how cool this is. Fuck yeah!
This was such a long time coming!
I remember all the Twitter account that keep saying Starship isn't physically / scientifically possible.
I am so looking forward to a successfully launch today.
Same with data centres in space, "Noooooo it cant work, heating in space, blah blah" same people, will never achieve anything in life as they only see limits.
Different category of doubts. It's unreasonable to say starship can't work in a world where the Saturn V did work.
For datacenters in space to work, they have to solve a bunch of unsolved problems and be more economical than datacenters in earth.
To be fair, radiators in space doesn't require any new technology. It's a very well understood problem. The best method is infrared radiators. Cooling is just a function of how large the surface area of the radiators, their heat, and the cooling required.
Where I think you're correct is that typical AI data centers require a LOT of cooling, and to achieve this at scale would require enormous radiators. So large that it's hard to square the business case given current launch costs. I've read a lot of research in this space and it looks like the much more realistic use cases (at least at first) will be sub-processing. Meaning processing data already in space. These could be telemetry, Starlink, tracking, telescopes, logistics, military, GPS, weather, deep space missions, first-response, alerts, etc. In particular, applications which require lower latency.
There are also other applications which are less cost sensitive. For example, applications which might be banned on Earth, or at risk of espionage, attack, or intrusion.
If we want to make typical AI data centers in space to be economical, we need launch costs to drop to under $200/kg. Interestingly, [Starship could reduce costs down to $67/kg.] Even lower with >9 launch cycles. (https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/rocket-developers-used...) This would make the business case *extremely* attractive.
Great comment and I agree with all of it except you're describing an expanded starlink rather than "datacenters in space". There are definitely workloads that benefit from being in space but that's different from being an economical place to put a rack of H200s doing training or inference.
Dissipating that much heat in the first place would be a first, you also need a butt ton of power so maybe you can shade your giant radiators with giant solar panels, but all of this needs to unfold from something launch-packaged.... AND be cheaper than just plugging them in on earth.
I agree on all points. That said, we're seeing a lot of preparatory activity from many places. SpaceX, Google, Starcloud, Blue Origin, Cowboy Space, Orbital Compute, Odyssey, and China’s ADA Space/Zhejiang Lab. SpaceX and Blue Origin have filed plans for huge orbital compute constellations. Google is developing TPU-equipped satellites under Project Suncatcher. Starcloud has already flown an Nvidia H100 in orbit. China’s ADA Space has also launched a small network of AI-compute satellites. A lot of very smart and very rich people are making big bets in this space.
We're still a few years away, but I suspect this is going to happen fast, starting with the edge/low latency compute.
Starlink already does this. Goalposts will be carried to next place once the first orbital data centre is serving tokens.
Starlink is "networking in space". The compute, power, and heat stories are minor compared to the networking benefits. Different story than making compute cheaper in space.
A better comparison would be Starlink, which had a bunch of unresolved problems and had to be more economical than existing satellite internet providers.
> For datacenters in space to work, they have to solve a bunch of unsolved problems and be more economical than datacenters in earth.
Tough problem, however it is notable that after SpaceX, there are now several other companies with similar plans, including Google: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/24/technology/google-suncatc...
One interpretation is they're all delusional. Another is that Musk showed the way and others now see it too.
"It's unreasonable to say starship can't work in a world where the Saturn V did work."
Most of the doubts were economical as well. Saturn V was extremely expensive, its per-unit cost could be expressed in still-human-readable fractions of the entire US GDP. Starship should be several orders of magnitude cheaper while providing more capabilities.
I don't doubt Starship, BTW. Great project.
funny that skeptics didn't pile on Google for the same plans... https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/24/technology/google-suncatc...
We did. It’s marketing and is unlikely to evolve into something real
Totally, just like all the haters of the Hyperloop!
You’re right, I’m just back from the city, took no time and was so cheap thanks to the hyperloop. Next week I go to Asia, I think I will use the rocket transport system Musk announced a few years ago. It’s so nice how my Tesla is making me so much money while I’m traveling, offering taxi service to everybody around. Next will I will get the add-on to have it join the Tesla compute fleet - it’s free compute if you think about it, given the solar roof is generating the energy! Might even get one of those humanoid robot to replace me at work. Just hope it’s not raining too much, my cybertruck steel plates are rusting a bit. Also, my kids are really enjoying their summer camp at the Mars colony!
Limits are security. Dont have to do this, don't have to risk that, no need for uncertainty, anxiety won't kill the weak confused mind...you can't fail if you never try (big brain!). That's the type. It is called cowards ;)
go for orbit!!!
planned 6 orbits, 10hr's in space the load of satelites will deploy 10x the banwidth of a single falcon launch making the economics of this venture rather startling for any 'competition'. if they nail the deploy, relights, and soft landings, it will time for everybody to rethink everything * * keep in mind they are already tinkering with on orbit fuel tranfer technology, which will lead to routine bunkering * other things, like doing visual condition inspections of every ship in orbit means there experience base grows at a rate that other companys litteraly cant imagine.
How can you compare the economics of it if you just have the bandwidth and not the cost?
Not a fan of Elon Musk at all, but SpaceX is damn impressive. Watching these key launches always makes me emotional for our species and what we can accomplish together.
mpv https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1qxvvenMPMQxB
works beautifully
SpaceX is a master lesson in over promising and under delivering
SpaceX deserves a higher caliber of hater. This low effort hate is unworthy.
At their bleeding edge, yes. Further back - their Falcon launch system is delivering far more reliably, frequently, and economically than any other launch system on Earth.
And that I've heard, actual buyers of launch services are perfectly aware of that distinction.
I find curious the Starship business ROI discussed here mentions almost exclusively Starlink and the moon.
Putting weapons in orbit seems a very likely goal, given the attitude of the current US leadership.
They felt confident enough to recently acknowledge publicly their existence:
https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/cmn07yjqg5rwo
Not just US - plenty of other countries will want to do the same, and there are only going to be a couple of countries with cheap payload capability.
China launched some classified mission just last week which was quite possibly weapons for disabling other satellites.